The Adobe Type Team blog

Posts in Category "Humor"

This summer, our managers Caleb Belohlavek and David Lemon decided it was time we hit the road for a hardcore offsite planning session. We wanted to share our extreme team-building experience with our readers—we hope you enjoy this glimpse into our life at Adobe.

The decision to get away for a team offsite was easy; figuring out where to go was not. The location needed to be somewhere fairly close to minimize travel and maximize brainstorming time. We were also looking for a place that would promote bonding and camaraderie beyond what’s possible in a traditional office setting.

As luck would have it, Caleb is the proud owner of a beautiful log home set on 20 acres in Grass Valley, a historic Gold Rush town nestled in the western foothills of Northern California’s Sierra Nevada Mountains. A scant three-hour drive from San Jose, the artsy-yet-pastoral charms of this rural oasis are far removed from the steel-and-glass towers and traffic jams of Silicon Valley.

When Caleb offered his home to our team for an offsite, we jumped at the opportunity to get out of the city and into a quiet place for a heavy-duty planning session. We settled on July 10-12 for the trip and cleared our calendars. Caleb set to work prepping his house for an influx of guests—deck washing, hot tub prep, and stockpiling a ton of provisions.

We all arrived in Grass Valley on a Wednesday afternoon and were greeted by wide-open spaces and a menagerie of friendly natives. There’s nothing quite like a huge yard full of alpacas, goats, horses, dogs, cats, and chickens to welcome city dwellers to country living. Continue reading…

Although now part of history—thanks to OpenType—one of the legacy PostScript font formats that has some mystique surrounding it is Type 42, mainly because of the apparent significance of that number in a particular series of books. I wrote the following on page 379 of my latest book as a description: Type 42 fonts are actually TrueType fonts with a PostScript wrapper so that they can reside within PostScript printers, and act much like PostScript fonts. A TrueType rasterizer must be present on the PostScript device in order to use Type 42 fonts.

Due to the nature of the three books I have written, Type 42 is mentioned, and with each subsequent book, more details about its history, in terms of selecting the number 42, are able to be revealed to the reader. This article chronicles the coverage of Type 42 in these three books, and while there is clearly some humor intended, there is also value in knowing the true history of this font format. What appears in this article are footnotes from these books, shown in their entirety, preserving their format (and any typos).Continue reading…

It was Adobe’s Technology Summit this week for us here. The Tech Summit is an internal event where many of the engineers gather to discuss and talk about the interesting products and technologies they’re working on. It’s an invaluable opportunity to meet in person many of the people we regularly contact only by e-mail, and it’s a great occasion to learn more about what’s going on in other areas of the company.Continue reading…

13 years and 9 months is the average amount of time that the current members of the Adobe Type Team have been here. The team consists of 14 members spread across our planet. Three members are in our Tokyo, Japan office, one is in our Beijing, China office, and the remaining ten are in the San Jose, California headquarters. What’s more, I believe that all but one of us have been in no other team since joining Adobe.

I joined Adobe in July of 1991, which means that I celebrated my 19th year just last month. Still, I am the third senior member, in terms of tenure at Adobe. Two or three others are right on my tail. This is a good thing.

So, what does this mean or imply? In my opinion and experience, this simply means that the Adobe Type Team consists of fourteen world-class people who have a strong passion and dedication to type and typography, as evidenced by their long tenure at Adobe, and perhaps more so by their equally-long tenure as members of the Adobe Type Team. There is a lot of history and expertise here, and being part of such a team is a pleasure and honor, and brings great satisfaction. I am sure that others in the team feel the same. Needless to say, working with our valued customers—some of whom work at type foundries themselves—is an equally pleasurable experience. Whether it is design, development, or testing, our work is never done, and perhaps more importantly, it is never done in a vacuum.

(BTW, I wrote a short Perl program a couple of years ago that outputs the average amount of time, in terms of years and months, that the Adobe Type Team members have been here. A recent execution of this program is what inspired this post.)

A few weeks ago, our friends at FontGear launched a new contest and we invite you to combine type and video in a way that moves us all. And while you’re at it, you can win some cash as well.

And fonts don’t have to be the key theme. Pick one that interests you, but make sure that your videos share some focus on the creative and obvious use of typographic concepts, subjects, and storylines. Entry is free!

Want to add some extra zip to your work? We’ve heard that Adobe has a few products like Adobe Photoshop, Premiere, Flash or After Effects which can help you to be your most creative. But we digress. Whatever your choice of tools, you have a chance to win big. First place takes $1000, Second place $500, and Third place can win you $250.

A jury of industry professionals, featuring Adobe’s own Ginna Baldassarre, will choose the three best font-related videos submitted. So get your type on some tape or your glyphs on some clips, but make sure you enter by September 30, 2010. Time, like a film reel, is always running out!

Did you ever watch the TV series “The Critic”? It was a cartoon series comedy about a movie reviewer (Jon Lovitz) who ended almost every (parody) review with “It stinks!” Sometimes I feel like a pale imitation of Lovitz when I write a post like this. But then, there’s a lot of stuff out there that stinks (Sturgeon’s Law), so what can I say. Maybe the approach of Christmas makes me feel more like the Grinch?

This time, it’s a “green” font. It turns out that “green” means… condensed. Yup, that’s it. Well, okay, they also added a couple of branches to the cap “T” to make it look more tree-like, and remind you that you’re being “green” by using a condensed sans-serif font to save paper. Now, let’s back up to the beginning of the story, and be a bit less critical for a moment.

About the Type

Typblography uses Adobe Clean, a typeface designed by Robert Slimbach for Adobe's exclusive use, which is delivered to this blog via Typekit, Adobe's font subscription service.

This blog looks best with ClearType turned on, if using Microsoft Windows. If the text looks jagged or rough, please check your Windows settings to ensure that ClearType is turned on. For more details, see the Typblography09/28/2010 and 10/13/2010 posts on this topic.